AN: Opening sections are flashbacks.
Seventeen-year-old me wanted Sessue to choose me. At twenty-one, I'm glad he chose family. I would have done the same.
When he started uni in Peijin, the distance, physical and figurative, set in. Our reunions were jubilant, a college boy, he'd regale tales of the big city, his erudite lecturers, and his brilliant classmates.
Then came the dreadful lull in the conversation when Sessue would turn to me and ask, "What about you?" and I had little new to share about high school, the dojo, and my family in our forgotten corner of EG. On the cusp of adulthood, among my peers who celebrated university acceptance letters, apprenticeships, new jobs in new cities, there was I, with nothing to look forward to, my life laying before me as a single road.
East Gorteau is capital-centric, Peijin is a vortex and the country is made of two: those in Peijin and those exiled from it. There would be no Peijin for me and Sessue, bade by his parents, would settle there after his studies.
Our relationship would have had a natural conclusion, even if his mother had never found out.
Sessue's mother, that raptor of a woman who called me a whore, showed her other face. Polite, prim, she came knocking and dumped in front of my father a heaping bag of rice that probably weighed as much as Huan. "Please respect our family's wishes. Take this for your family's trouble."
Paba stirred the rice before lifting the scoop. He watched the grains tumble out one by one then in a stream before pouring the rice atop her head.
Paba found me under a blanket, all cried out.
"Curled up like a sleeping snail," he said. "Even they have to wake up sometime."
"I'm not ten, paba," I said. He massaged my head in the magic way only he knew. Pressure points were his specialty and his hands in a minute chased the mental storm and blues away. For a moment I was ten again, the manic wild child, spinning and desperate, and then, I was serene after one head massage.
"I wish I had been more decisive years ago when you were ten. You'd have an easier time now." Before I could ask for clarification, he said, "Come on, let's go fish."
Crouching knee-deep in saltwater was the last thing I wanted. "Noooooo," I groaned but he was already digging his arms beneath me to carry me through the jungle to the shore.
We caught small wrasse, blue flower crabs, but he warned to leave the electric eels alone. "I learned the hard way. Their shocks are shaped like a tree, a living thing branching, spreading wider and thinner," he said when the water flashed and the buzzing air smelled like a thunderstorm. "Zoologists thought eels froze their prey with shocks, but newer discoveries show eels can remotely control their prey's nervous system. Cool huh? Picture an electric-pack in your muscles and with precise zaps, you could manipulate your food to swim right into your open jaws."
All changed the day I returned home from school but Huan didn't.
Paba informed me that he was defecting. He had relinquished parental rights and Huan was now a ward of the state. Orphaned, but shielded from the legal consequences of my defection, he said. He didn't need to utter why his disabled son was a liability when crossing the demilitarized border. What about Amari? Her husband would have to bribe and wring every good grace to his family name, but she'd narrowly escape internment, he said, someone who had been planning his traitorous plan for ages. And then, I asked, what about me?
Could my father know so little of me that he planned I would defect and leave my siblings behind? I turned to leave.
"This will hurt, but you'll thank me." Then paba struck me from behind, in the wing of my shoulder and it was unlike anything I had thought of this Earth.
A searing flash, a power shaped like a tree that burned so bad I couldn't hear the screams from my aching throat. For an eternity in a second, I thought I seeing my death, watching my soul was being drawn as vapor from my body. Then a deeper knowledge in my core swore this wasn't death but an awakening.
When I later told Abiji of my baptism, I only relayed the terror, but I kept secret from her the comforting assurance of this lateral beyond I didn't yet understand. There was gout, the leathery winged demon that lurked grinning at the corners of my life but now there would be this power, this Nen, promising to always accompany me.
End of flashbacks.
The Heaven's Arena sis shows no concern at how I must clutch the counter for balance when she delivers the address paba gave her to give to me 'should I ever want to barge in'.
"This isn't in the arena?" I say with dismay.
An early evening wind fights at my uwagi and I half-wish to return to the hugging softness of Danchou's sofa upstairs but through the streets I go. Down a few blocks and I enter the historical district seen from our first drive into Heaven's City. The Arena crowds thin and soon I'm possessed with a crude awareness, enough to notice someone's heavy gaze on me.
I pause and palm one glove—the buzzing air smells of a thunderstorm. Hurried footsteps then an all-consuming flash, CRACKLE, and then an agonized howl that sounds like crashing of metal on a highway. A black suit-clad man judders on the pavement, back curled, hands clawed.
"Someone is popular," says paba emerging from behind, his voice like delayed thunder. He kicks black suit over on his back and grips his chin at three points. Nen shadows the skin of his jaw with whorls of fern. What could he be doing, but the answer comes easily when paba asks his first question. He's interrogating him.
Through foamy lips, the man answers, "Tailing...Odara…orders not to kill in city limits..."
"That name mean anything to you?" paba asks.
I rub my forehead, suffering to even begin to explain Odara…
"She stole five million…old orders were to track, but orders changed to apprehend after," he sputters. "She killed one of our men…"
"I didn't—he's not dead!" I lose too much air and darkness speckles my vision. My orientation of up and down sways to and fro and I must hug a bus stop bollard. In my bubbling vision, paba stands up and reaches forward, neon blue glowing at his fingertips.
"It hurts I know," he says. "But you'll thank me in a second."
Faster than I can resist, his warm touch at my clammy forehead then the familiar jolt shaped like a tree, trunk to branches reaching forward. Top to toe, I fit for an eternity in a second. Then as soon as I felt its heat, it's over and I no longer need the post for support. Hawk-eye clarity in my sight and fluidity in my limbs, all neurotoxic clumsiness chased away.
"I watched your match," says paba. "How Pigtails made it to the high 100s without a single ref figuring out her trick I'll never know—"
"He's not dead, is he?" I point to the body that smells like livewire. His stiff arms and hands clawed at the sky.
"I'm not done interrogating him. He was following you since you left the Arena. Have I taught you nothing? How did you not notice?"
I rewear my glove. "If I noticed someone was following me, I would have naturally thought it was you."
"You need to drop the accusation in your tone," he says. "You haven't yet told me how you got five million in the hole with the mob—"
Again. Suffering to explain.
"I could get him to lead us to their headquarters," he says.
Another neon blue touch to the man's temple and his clawed hands relax. With unfocused eyes, he wipes the foam from his chin and his body floats upward. A chagrined air about him as he smoothes the wrinkles in his suit.
A crackling neon blue thread links paba's hand to the man's nervous system. What might happen if you combined Machi's Nen threads and Omokage's dolls. I had had suspicions about paba's Nen ability. When I discovered Nen suddenly the questions too dangerous to ask had answers: Why our flat had power when the rest of the city had roaring blackouts and how paba could manipulate my mood when I was either a manic wild child or more despondent than a dead doornail. Suspicions are one thing, seeing lightning tamed and sparking between his fingers is another.
"How much Nen affinity did you lose to construct a manipulator's ability from transmutation?" I mutter.
"None. I'm just tricking my prey to swim right into my open jaws."
Paba elongates his thread, the air crackling as he does so, and veils his Nen with In. He could follow the man, inconspicuously in a crowd, manipulating his nervous system with hands tucked casually in his pockets.
Possessed with a new purpose, the man moves in the direction of his presumed base. Where countless men could be stationed, armed with guns and (thanks to me) explosives—I block them both.
"Don't get involved."
"Pigtails, your opponent from the Arena told me—"
"You interrogated her?"
"Of course I did. Right after your match. She said the freakin mob is after you. I'm a father, involving myself is what I do."
Paba doesn't even have to move to order the mobster to shove me aside into the bus stop shelter. Nen-enhanced I bet because that swept me clear off my feet. My shoulder dented the plastic casing, which surprises me but not paba.
I rub my smarting shoulder. "You have no right."
"You should know why I can't sit back and do nothing."
"You, have, no, right." He's watched my matches so my speed doesn't surprise him. He parries my punch.
"Still as slow as a sleeping snail."
"I'm not ten." Twenty-one or ten, I still can't land a hit. He's gotten stronger. He parries me with one hand, feints to the left, then strikes me in the sternum. He angled the hit up, which sent me skyward before skidding on the cement. Throbbing tailbone and hip, yet I manage to stagger up.
"I'm not gonna fight you, Safra," he says in a clear monotone meant to ground me and I hate it for it is the same condescending tip-toe-around-you trained-tone the nurses and doctors use when they think you're agitated. "I saw your mental state a second ago and you're a few perilous steps from a full-blown manic episode."
"Paba, don't make me question reality—this is anger, not mania."
I have no control over my mania or depression, but I indulge the thrilling image. Succumbing to the leather winged demons who promise me that I can be all-powerful, fly off the tallest buildings, and feel no pain—
"Safra...you're not listening to me."
Paba could close the gap between us faster than I can blink, but he hasn't yet because of stuff he learned from Ma's psychiatrist. Give her a chance to come down. Never make her feel insane; she'll never forgive you.
"I don't have to," I say, my voice sounds separate from me.
The whirling isn't from the neurotoxin, but from me. Paba, seeing more than what is with me, holds me to his breast then presses fingers to my temple. I brace for the razor jolt, but nothing of the sort comes. Rather, Mien, all essence of safety and kindness, guides my inner self away from the edge, down to where the air is easy to breathe and the ground solid. He still smells like the dojo, the seashore, and clean gi.
"This is my fault," he says. "I should have faced you when I first saw you in the lobby."
"Why didn't you?" I ask, pulling away, more solid on my feet.
He changes the subject. "Are you seeking regular treatment?"
We both know the answer.
"My condition has been otherwise good," I say. "Stress from the neurotoxin aside—"
"We'll talk about that later," he says and frowns at my feet. "You still insist on those damn pigeon toes?"
Click! go my heels.
Paba's ability is one Danchou would love to steal. With a few swift jolts at the guards, any would-be witnesses, we're escorted to the 35th suite floor of some ritzy hotel.
"You're not…" I say. "You're going to—"
"What? Kill him?" says paba. "Too messy."
"Spoken like a psychopath."
He ignores that. "How long ago did this happen?"
"Maybe week ago," I say. Wallahae, not even a week.
"Easy. All short term."
Our Nen-leashed escort opens the suite door and I guard my eyes from the flashes of light. Shutters like a camera flash. One by one, the suits drop to the pristine carpet, landing on twisted limbs like dolls cut from marionette lines. Paba is so fast he already rounds on Odara seated behind the executive desk by the curtained window. He recognizes me but paba sets two fingers to each temple, the air buzzes, and I watch his arrogant sense of self diminish.
"Tell me the story," says paba, fulfilling a Nen condition I bet. With a possessed glow in his eyes, Odara tells him the whole wretched story, the call from Danchou, the 'infamous Phantom Troupe', the purchased explosives, his first leering at me, trying to decipher who I was through my speech and manner, the gloved hands he was forbidden to touch, the Spiders' anger when I accept the proposition, then Odara's anger when I never returned from the bathroom, his subsequent warning to Danchou, then his hissed orders to his men to apprehend me, his hiring Pigtails to incapacitate me so I'd be strapped to a stretcher then an 'ambulance' would drive me to another location after I killed one of his men ("I did not.") When we barged in, he had been flipping through his Rolodex, phone in his jeweled hand at the ready to call the Ten Dons ("Who?") to hire proper assassins to take care of me. His anger heats the room like a furnace.
"Only you, Safra," scoffs paba.
He focuses. The sudden flash, the startled cry from Odara, I wince knowing the shape of the power, how its tendrils dig through layers of memory, and it's over, too fast. The glow passes from his eyes, but shellshocked and slumped in his chair, a boneless and papery old man. Peering down, I wonder in disbelief how he had been the one to loom so imminently.
"For all his anger at losing the five million," says paba, reading some of the vouchers scattered on his desk. "He made a heck more than that betting on you in the Arena."
"What's the story?" I ask in the elevator, my nose still wrinkled from the stench of burned hair. Doubt won't let me trust what I've just seen.
"Drained his emotion around the five million, from inflamed to bored. Changed his perception from theft to pesky miscommunication about price. Now he vaguely remembers that someone, can't remember their face, not important, came to collect the remaining five million. His mistake, so he won't want to recall the memory."
"What about others who've heard the real events?"
"Men like him don't divulge his embarrassment to others. Pigtails didn't know. And those in his inner circle were all in that room and all of them had their short-term memories zapped."
I immediately picture crispy chicken. "Like fried?"
"Think sieve. The finer details slip through. Forgotten." The elevator dings! as we arrive on the ground floor. "Anyway, you hungry?"
I still want to challenge him, but my traitorous stomach growls, and next I know, I'm following his graying head of hair down the narrow streets to the same restaurant I had gone to with Netero and Beans.
The waitress looks up from the PA system and nods at paba. "The usual?"
"Enough for two, please," he says.
"Oolong or plum tea today?"
"It's a soju occasion." The waitress and I both raise an eyebrow.
"Since when do you drink?" I ask as we sit facing each other.
"Still don't, but if I leak any secrets, a different state is listening and this state doesn't care that I defected."
Chwit! Chwit! The familiar sound of wheel turning and a spark and I snatch the unlit cigarette from his lips. "Since when do you smoke?!" I break it in half and crumble it into a napkin. "Ma would kill you." I continue. "Is there a defector's bucket list? Top Ten Things You Must Do When You Defect? Start smoking, start drinking, abandon your kids so you can eat lobster noodles?"
"Lobster what—? Slow down. I didn't abandon my kids. I didn't abandon you," he says, with another cigarette he's trying to light. Again, I steal it and crumble it into tobacco dust in my glove.
"What's with the gloves?" he asks and I tuck both hands under my thighs under the table, hoping he won't notice my armature. "They're for your protection, not mine."
"What heck does that mean?"
"Don't change the subject—"
"You take them off when you're gonna use Nen, as you showed earlier and in the rink—"
"Abandon—" I say, the sounds plosive on my lips. "Is the word for leaving me, incapacitated, after you awakened my Nen."
"You asked me to teach you and I had been all those years," he says. "Each time we trained, each time we meditated, it was to slowly open nodes. Each time I used Mien to calm you down so you wouldn't turn out like your mother."
He says that drivel when she's not here to defend herself? "Ma wasn't so bad."
"You were too young to remember." A third cigarette he flips between knuckles like his lightning, something for his hands to do. "She was a rapid cycler."
"I remember plenty."
"Do you?" he says with a cynical, mirthless chuckle that I hate. "Do you remember her rage episodes? Her depression? Her suicide attempts—" A clot in his throat. I let him light the cigarette and take a deep drag. "I know what you're going to ask. Mien isn't a miracle cure, only a supplement. Though I like to think it meant fewer breaks and calmer cycles for your mother and you."
A distant dullness in his eyes as he reminisces. "Let me tell you, your sister would get so jealous, saying I loved you more."
That's not how I remember it. "You and ma doted on Amari."
"Heh, I sometimes forget, you weren't on this Earth yet when your mother had postpartum depression with Amari. Rejected Amari for a year. You though, your Ma was ecstatic when you came along. Her bundle of morning twilight and adorable ghost eyes, she would steal you from my arms—Do they serve the soju before or with the food?—Anyway, we had a different name picked out, but she changed it to Safra. Your sister thought she treated you better all the more for it.
"Your ma knew in her bones you had bipolar, years before symptoms manifested. Mothers just know I guess. So I started treating you with Mien so you'd sleep and Amari cried. Even later, after you were diagnosed, when she was old enough to understand why her sister needed different attention, she'd show up, a hiccuping, sobbing, snotty mess—Why does Safra get more attention? Paba, you train her more and me less because you don't love me as much as her. I never differentiated my children."
"Would you have taken Sessue with you had he been your son instead of Huan?"
"Is that what you think?" Another drag from his cigarette. "Everything I did, I did for family."
"I'll never understand you."
"Maybe not, but you as well listen this time to the reasons I defected," he says with the gusto of waiting three years to explain himself. "You wanna know when I wanted to defect? Not when I was the best in my division and not allowed to compete with the upper echelons. Not when your mother passed too young. Not after Huan's accident. When did I decide I did not want to die in East Gorteau? Sessue."
A name I haven't heard spoken aloud in years and in a finger-snap, my heart flutters and I'm fifteen years old again.
"What about Sessue?"
"His Ma, I should be more precise. When she came over."
"Did you know we were...?" I didn't mean to interrupt but I had never asked and not knowing had itched over time.
"I had a hunch. His mooning about our neighborhood, conveniently staying late on the days you cleaned after classes. I was fine with you two dating. He'd try in vain to do better than you. So I wasn't in total surprise, unlike Sessue's mother when she arrived one humid day to inform me that you two were seeing each other and the scandal would have to end. And for our troubles, she'd bestow upon us a bag of rice.
"Then I pictured you, Safra, who'd made sure there was food to eat. You'd ration our electricity to neighbors. And not knowing who they were dealing with, they'd try to haggle, ¼ of a loaf is too much for the price to bake it! The coal in the market would be cheaper! And you'd call them on their bluff and shut the door in their faces. I became familiar with your prices—"
"Paba, why are you reminding me of this in the middle of the story?
"—4 red bean cookies out of two cookie trays. Half a kilo of corn for hot bathwater. One bottle of cooking oil so the corner tenant's son could use our hall light for a week to cram for exams. Huan hated your rationing but he never went to school hungry, did he—"
"Paba…"
"So this well-to-do stranger appears uninvited on my doorstep, with a heaping bag of rice, and she decided all on her own that bag was the cost of me telling you that you and your bad songbun weren't pure enough for her son. Watching grains of rice she didn't care about spilling out, I never felt so cheap in my life. I couldn't stay. Not after that."
The waitress arrives with a hot pot of what I can smell to be blue flower crab stew and oyster mushrooms—food that by its mere steam and smell could rejuvenate the soul. I intend to serve paba the larger crab but he switches bowls with me and crushes his two-drag smoked cigarette.
"That was only one reason," says paba after a few bites of stew. "There was another that added urgency. You remember those visits from the State about our electricity?"
"I was questioned too. How could I forget?"
"Well, one official came, checked the wiring, checked the closets, cut into the wall to check for generators, the usual, but I overheard him on a phone, whispering that he had suspicions that I was, what his superior called, a Nen user— Paba sees my face—"What? You think the State doesn't have Nen users?"
"So you were exposed."
"I zapped his memory, but when he returned to Peijin a competent Nen user could figure out his memory had been augmented by Nen. I had 3 days max."
When they come, you will do nothing. You will know nothing. And they will not find out what you are. If they do, they'll never let you go.
"Out of your three children," I ask. "Why did you only ask me to defect with you?"
"I could bring only one of you and I didn't want what happened to your mother to happen to you. You know how your mother became a mortician? She was a medical major, dissecting cadavers. No doc had diagnosed her until her early adulthood and no one thought it strange if she stayed up for three days straight studying because her grades were brilliant. After she was stamped INSANE on her record, schooling wasn't to be wasted on her. So she refashioned her skills."
"Ma being a mortician is not a tragic story. Anyone would be lucky to love their job as much as her."
"It's not that, Safra. A litany spread over a lifetime. Like the double-sided comments from your teachers. Safra is such a bright student. It's such a shame…and context said the rest. The deepest knife was that you believed you deserved no better. Better prospects, better medical care so you won't spend the brightest decades of life cycling between two poles until they institutionalized you or worse."
"I'm not...like Ma in that regard."
"You'll hate me for saying this," he says. "You screamed so hard it still echoes in my bones, but I'm glad I awakened your Nen, which gave you the ability to defect." He asks about where I first went after defecting. Turns out both of us were uneasy about staying a rock's throw away in WG and fled North. He liked Heaven's City for its landmark dojos and reverence for martial arts, though he's benevolent about the Arena. It lured amazing and creative fighters but he chaffed at the casino-theatrics. "Great visibility though, should you have gone looking for me," he said.
"What are your next plans?" he asks.
"To go South."
"Forget those plans," he says. "Stay here. I know someone who can forge a diploma from West Gorteau. Attend the local uni next spring. It's one of the "Big Five" and the university hospital is world-class. Get a good health regimen then go study whatever you want. Go date whomever you want."
He never meant to challenge me. Only to plead that I stay in Heaven's City.
"I'm going South. I'm working to smuggle Amari and Huan out."
He shakes his head. "It's impossible. It will never work, Safra. It will only break your heart."
He doesn't understand that I have Ging and the Phantom Troupe and how inconceivably strong and capable they are. How we figured out Abiji's Nen condition.
"What will you do if you do smuggle them out?" he asks.
"I'm flush with winnings from the Arena. Should be enough to get started in WG."
"But you won't settle here and start regular treatment when you need it now?"
He glimpsed my mind when it was in a uniquely frazzled state so of course he thinks that.
"You need treatment now," he says. "They can wait."
"You don't know that."
"Wait, are you fasting?" he says with a slight incredulity at my half-eaten bowl. When I don't answer, he says, "You know, I fasted when I arrived. Fasted for six months, hoping you'd show up, until I got sick, sicker than I ever was in Gorteau. Then I realized fasting for you to change your mind was sacrilegious, the wrong pilgrimage. You didn't want to be forced. If you ever would change your mind, it'd be of your own impetus. I had faith, in the same way I knew you'd show up in the Arena lobby, that you'd find me someday. I got my wish and what happened? When you cried paba in the lobby, it sounded too much like when I used my hatsu on your shoulder and I couldn't face you."
Ging's words echos in my mind, I'd make myself scarce.
"But I'm happy you defected," he says. "I'm happy for that much."
"You think you didn't force me," I say. "But how much choice is there between prison and defection?"
"What was I supposed to do, Safra?"
The waitress delivers one bottle of soju and two glasses. The green glass reminds me of Heineken.
"Why did you talk to Phinks?" I blurt out.
"Refresh my memory."
"The street fighter."
"Oh, the tall one, blond like Sessue."
"You've missed these cheap shots more than anything else," I mutter, pouring him a glass.
"Let the record show he talked to me."
"He didn't give me that impression."
"Fine. You ask him."
"I don't even care that much."
"Wher—where the heck is mother's keepsake?" he says, gripped anew with urgency.
I touch my naked neck, wishing to shrink and die. It's oxidizing at the bottom of a drain, I don't say. "I take it off before each fight. I forgot to rewear in the confusion with the neurotoxin."
"You're not as good of a liar as you think."
"Then you can ask Phinks next time you see him." I sip the glass poured for me and the clear spirit stings my throat. "How can people drink this?"
"Have they done something to it? Or are they holding it as collateral?"
I give him the least terrible answer. "Nothing that crooked. As they so kindly put it, I needed a 'carrot' dangling in front of my nose to become interested in Nen training. Once I learned key concepts, I'd get it back."
"Sure sounds crooked. Why would they be so interested in your Nen development?"
I'm immensely glad he hadn't recognized them by Odara saying the Phantom Troupe. "My Nen is very unique and that interests them. I'm a...contractor—" I fight to keep a straight face. "Once Huan and Amari are out and I complete my contract after the new year, we'll go our separate ways."
There are a million suspicious things he could nitpick about what I said. "How much would it cost to buy you out of your contract?"
I shake my head and refill his glass. "It's a good arrangement. The best I could hope for." Now I'm not sure where the lie started and ended.
"It may be, but you shouldn't delay treatment," he says. "Or living your life." I'm about to reiterate, but he chases my words away.
"I'm sick, Safra."
Chatter and clinking of utensils and glasses as I sit in stone-cold silence means that time carelessly carries on, even when I need it to pause for my sake.
"That could mean anything," I murmur soft enough to sound as if I'm only speaking to myself. "From a cold to…"
"The docs say I have a year. Fingers crossed maybe I can make it two."
Ten can delay aging, bullets bounce off Ren like rubber, Nen users leap from great heights and land as soft as air, my paba's lifeforce slowed the progression of my bipolar; I've seen countless presentations of superhumanity—When did I imbibe the fiction that Nen users are near-invincible? And can I be blamed?
"I want to see you in treatment." Paba's words reach me. "Attending uni or whatever vocation you want. I can't sit back and watch you obsess over smuggling your siblings at the cost of your life—"
A shock, one of his many jolts, to sap my values and my spirit. I'm up and moving away from the table. "You don't get to do that to me."
Paba hurriedly follows behind, through the restaurant banner in long strides. He reaches forward, about to halt me by my elbow, but he stops.
He doesn't make Omokage's mistake. He widens the girth between him and the volatile stone. "I awakened your Nen, only for you to wield it against me."
My parting words delivered over my scarred shoulder, "I'm glad you defected."
Zero yield and time-triggered so when the timer runs out, the Nen dissipates into a screen of smoke. By the time it clears, I'm long gone.
I text Ging: May your son never find you.
When my phone rings, I power it off.
AN: Writing this dialogue scene between only two people was HARDER than 12+ character PT ensemble scenes. I'm still not 100% happy with this chapter but this tangle of thorns wasn't supposed to be easy to write. Parents and our relationship with them can be complicated. He wasn't supposed to take out Odara in my original outline, yet the parent in him stepped in. SO MANY BEATS I couldn't miss or delay and that was fighting me. I wanted to put a magnanimous period on their relationship, but the narrative went a different direction and that took so long because... I almost chickened out. I hope this chap answers some narrative questions. Some secrets I discovered while writing (I'm still stunned tbh) and I'm just as shocked as Safra and not everything is as she remembers. Ah 1st person POV.
Though I took forever to update (pandemic fatigue hit like a wiffleball bat) you all blew me away with your encouraging messages and well wishes. It's been a long-ass year, but we'll make it through this!
THANK YOUS to Sayuri Tamano, Bisque-Ware, xxANIES, albany. sr, Biyoshi, xSiriuslyPadfoot, Choking. On. Marshmallows, LinIsSleepy, Kimaris, WormwoodSand, Gabriel1901, AwkwardBlackCat, RoseGirl99, Back alley guest, Meowmash, Yeetus, Anon, and ANONito!
